PS4 Speculation Points To No 4K For Gaming, Restrictions On Used Games And No Backwards Compatibility

Rumour me up.

TSA Staff, 3 years ago, 68 comments.

The worst part about being on the cusp of a new generation is the crazy conspiracy theories and rampant rumour-mongering.

And today it’s the turn of PSM3 magazine, Future’s print mag that will see its latest issue on the shelves shortly as the publisher moves to reduce the number of magazines and focus on its formidable online portfolio.

It’s going out with a bang, though, as GameFront.de reports the latest issue is primed with a big pile of PlayStation 4 rumours.

The first one being that it’s not going to be called the PlayStation 4, due to the number 4’s superstitious connotations in Japan. 4 is considered unlucky, and has an alternative pronunciation related to death.

Other aspects from the report say that the rumoured 4K resolution won’t be for games, just for movies. Good, if the next gen aims for 1080p at a decent frame rate that’ll be absolutely fine.

What else is in there? Sony will show demos at E3 next year, they’ll look like Watch Dogs and Star Wars 1313 did on PC this year, and everyone will be rather excited. Except those that like used games, because the rumour is that games will be registered with a PSN account and it won’t be easy to play pre-owned titles. Remember this is just speculation, there’s no confirmation that any of this will actually happen.

Onwards? How about between 4GB and 8GB of RAM? No backwards compatibility with PS3 and PS2, oddly, although that’s likely to be covered by the Gaikai deal as we’ve said in the past. The mag points to Move being important (and possibly bundled) although that’s again just guesswork and most likely not going to end up the case.

The price? 400€-500€. We’ll see.

The PS4 – or whatever it’ll end up being called – is heavily rumoured to be coming next year. We’ve written plenty about it, including this discussion piece which picks up on most of the consolidated chat and technical guesswork.

Ps4 should live to the saying ‘it only does everything’ just not pre owned lol but isn’t physical copy seeing a decline in sales, I maybe wrong but soon or later pre owned will become a dead thing. If publishers can prove their software right rather than 49.99 for a half baked game then people won’t buy pre owned.

But again this can also depends on Internet speeds & most countries don’t have good Internet so I don’t know. Virgin rules though

Same, however everyone else’s purchasing habits can have an effect on us. If people can’t trade in, they might be less likely to buy new IPs or make impulse purchases, which could damage new or smaller developer, which could hurt us all!

Oh, and no backwards compatibility would mean my huge PS Plus collection would not be transferrable to the PS4, which would also mean I (and most PS Plus users) will remain on the PS3 for a length of time.

So far, I’m pretty underwhelmed by what the ‘next generation’ is going to offer. I hope all rumors are false, and Sony/MS will dish out a beast of a new console.

Major essential feature: full integration between the Vita and PS4, making ALL new games playable via remote-play.

In Japanese, 4 can be either “shi” or “yon”. Shi is for “death”, so that’s why it’s unlucky, because it all depends on how each person reads it. But at the same time, every PS3 japanese commercial I’ve seen never refers to it as “san”, but rather “three”. They could still go with “four”.

With backwards compability on more powerful hardware, you might be able to play games with improved performance. Allowing you to make room on your TV-bench by removing the PS3. I’d pay a lot of extra money for a model with BC.

DDR3 is cheap, but the high performance GDDR5 which would be used is expensive.

DDR3 is commonly used at between 1066Mhz and 1600Mhz, these days, but even 8 years down the line, this is only up to 2/3rds as fast as the GDDR3 RAM which was used in the 360 and PS3. (The PS3 also has 256MB of XDR, which is 1.5x the speed of GDDR3 again).

GDDDR5, though, is 2.5x the speed of GDDR3 even, and roughly 4x as fast as DDR3 at 1600Mhz. With a shared pool of memory, as seen in the 360, and as you might expect in next generation consoles, all the RAM needs to be at the standards required by the GPU to maximise performance. So they have to use this more expensive RAM to not bottleneck the system.

Which provides an interesting choice for Microsoft & Sony because GDDR5 might not be in required module sizes in high-volume production in time for next summer’s likely production run.

Current high volume (cheaper) production of GDDR5 is in 256MB modules, meaning 16 chips to reach 4GB… that’s an impossible scenario in a console’s form factor, so MS & Sony will need to take a hit on non-mass produced 512MB modules of GDDR5 if 4GB and not 2-3GB is the aim.

@Para: This is historically true, but the 360 and PS3 started a trend of having deeper, always available OS overlays. The WiiU has 2GB of RAM, but half of that is supposed to be reserved for the OS to run on… 1GB in total!

Add on top of that how limiting the 512MB of RAM is in both systems (more so on the PS3, granted), and it’s important that they don’t underestimate the RAM required to offer the best long term staying power.

Ideally they would get 4GB of RAM. I would be concerned, were they to go with 2GB of RAM about whether they wouldn’t be limited by this again in 3 or 4 years time.

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